A few hours into the joint American-Israeli strikes on Iran, my phone rang. A reporter, calling from Israel, of all places, wanted to know if I had seen "the footage.” They mentioned a missile strike on Incirlik military base in Adana, Türkiye. Had I heard anything? Was there a statement?

They were talking about a fake footage purporting to show the aftermath of an Iranian missile attack on Turkish soil. The visual grammar of catastrophe was there, carefully planted amid a real war featuring real Iranian missiles and real American and Israeli munitions, so the fake had found a fertile soil. It was so plausible that even serious journalists cared to pick up the phone.

Just yesterday, another video circulated – this time, purporting to show Tel Aviv in ruins, with a superimposed text that read: "Netanyahu has destroyed Israel.” This time, the disinformation campaign presumably aimed to demoralize Israel’s allies, encourage anti-Netanyahu voices, and possibly "prove” the effectiveness of Iran’s war machine.

And then there was a third incident – a WhatsApp message featuring a photograph of a vast industrial facility, rows of cylindrical objects lined up like grey giants: "This is Russia’s Proton Nuclear Missile Production Center!” Tests at the North Pole showed each warhead radiating 3,000 degrees of heat across 100 square kilometers. Israel, too, allegedly had a similar munition, already programmed with Ankara’s coordinates! Nevermind that the photograph – an actual photograph from an actual facility – showed Proton-M rockets, commercial launch vehicles that carry telecommunications satellites into orbit for paying customers. As always, just a dash of reality followed by utter nonsense, skillfully designed to dupe unsuspecting "consumers” of information and to intimidate its intended audience.

These seemingly unrelated cases offer valuable insight into the information environment of 21st-century warfare, waged in the age of artificial intelligence. We tend to think of wartime disinformation as a single operation featuring a state actor flooding the zone with false narratives. What we are actually watching is something closer to an open marketplace. The war creates the conditions: elevated fear, shattered routine, and the desperate human need to understand what is happening before it happens to you. Into that space pour dozens of actors with dozens of agendas, whether state-sponsored or just ideologically motivated. Some are grifters chasing engagement. Others are genuinely confused people sharing what they believe to be true.

The Tel Aviv footage and the Ankara missile warning do not come from the same hand. They serve opposing emotional purposes – one is designed to demoralize Israelis or discredit their leadership, the other to frighten Turks into feeling like targets. They may have originated in entirely different countries, produced by people who have never communicated with one another. Yet they circulate in the same feeds, arrive in the same WhatsApp groups, and together produce a single effect: the comprehensive collapse of the viewer's ability to distinguish what is real.

Thucydides, writing about the plague that struck Athens during the Peloponnesian War, observed that catastrophe does not merely kill – it dissolves the social fabric that makes rational collective life possible. People abandoned the sick. Temples were used as morgues. Laws meant nothing because the future meant nothing. The plague and the war worked together, each amplifying the destructive power of the other. What we are watching today is an information equivalent of that dynamic. War does not merely generate disinformation. It creates the precise psychological conditions – urgency, fear, the collapse of normal habits – under which disinformation becomes most potent.

Türkiye sits at a particular intersection in this landscape. Geographically proximate to the conflict and culturally connected to populations on multiple sides, the country is home to large communities with family ties across the region. And equipped with WhatsApp penetration rates that make it one of the most efficient transmission networks in the world for exactly this kind of viral, closed-channel content. When someone wants a fear narrative to reach Turkish households by morning, the architecture already exists.

The Israeli reporter who called me was doing their job. Having encountered something that looked real, they picked up the phone to check. That is what journalists are supposed to do. What troubled me was not the call itself but what it implied about the current information environment. Nobody knows where ground truth lives anymore. So they call wherever they think someone might know.

The answer to this is not technological. Synthetic media detection tools will always lag behind synthetic media production. The answer is not regulatory, at least not primarily: laws cannot be passed fast enough to govern a landscape that changes weekly. The answer is epistemic: a collective relearning of the difference between something that feels true and something that has been verified. That is harder than it sounds, because our brains were not designed for a world in which realistic video can be produced by anyone with a laptop and an afternoon to spare.

What I know is this: The next time your phone buzzes with footage of something terrible, the first question to ask is not, "Is this happening?" The first question is, "Who benefits from me believing this is happening?" That pause, that single breath of suspicion before the share button, is the only defense any of us actually has. The battlefield now has a WhatsApp address. Learning to read it is not optional.